greta gerwig's "barbie" and girlhood in film

what it meant to grow up on barbies

Now, I know that Barbie won’t be out until the summer, but the teaser trailer is enough to have me obsessed. I grew up on Barbies. My brother and I used to put ours in boxes and launch them down the stairs for “white water rafting”. My siblings and I didn’t have any Ken dolls, so our Barbies played every role. And maybe this is silly to say, but Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse was one of the first times I saw a woman in a role that wasn’t a mother. Barbie and all her careers. It was all our ambitions in one doll, and if Barbie can go to the moon, why can’t we? I haven’t been this excited for a movie in a long time.

I loved Barbies. And nobody does girlhood and all its complications better than Greta Gerwig.

I never saw myself a woman. I was a girl, a nuisance, pushing myself back into a box like how I pushed my bones back under my skin. And by my own design, I was in an eternal kind of girlhood, because I did not allow myself to grow out of it. I wanted to be grown up, but I also didn’t want to experience it.

Lady Bird and Little Women are two different stories about the act of growing up. Lady Bird is aching to leave Sacramento, and Jo is begging to stay in childhood forever. But, of course, this will never happen, and so with time, you must learn to get up and going again. Lady Bird was one of those movies that made me cry because it made me think of my mother, and who I was, and who I could be.

Girlhood, often, was the realization that I wanted to get up and leave, leave Toronto and Vancouver and Calgary and every place I’d ever known, but knowing I could not take care of myself. In Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, one of my favourite coming of age films, Sam and Suzy get up and leave their homes, go out on their own. For the longest time, this was all that I wanted. To abandon any notion I had of home and go somewhere new. To be unknown in every way. I’d spent too long being a shade of myself, trying to be like the people around me. It was raining, once, when my dad picked me up from work. He was telling me a story, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how reflective the paint lines on the road were, washed out by the water until you couldn’t see them anymore. You couldn’t see paint, only the lights and the rain. And I couldn’t help but think, how often do we mirror all those around us, only to wash our true selves away, and cease to exist. Some of girlhood, I think, is a begging to be noticed. Girlhood is a raw scream in your throat, clawing its way out, only to go unnoticed.

Growing up, it seems, does not save me, or anyone, from the ramblings I’d developed as a child.

How does this connect to Barbie? Good question. I don’t want to put a blanket over every type of girlhood because it’s all so different for everyone, so I’m just going off what how I experienced it. Girlhood is kind of like this: you experience childhood, but you are also experiencing girlhood and it builds on you like a bruise on the skin of childhood. And for me, Barbies was a staple of that. Barbie was a girl, but she was everything. As I knew her, she wasn’t dependent on Ken (in fact, he depended on her), and she had so many careers that I’d never even considered dreaming about.

Lady Bird left me with the longing to grow up and get out, something I’d experienced many times before, and Little Women was the idea that I was growing up and I couldn’t stop it, no matter I forced my bones back under and clung to the things I loved at ten years old. Barbie, I think, no matter what it’s about, will bring me back to that time in childhood before I longed to get out or stay the same. To a time when I was content with who I was, where I was, who I knew and who knew me. A reminder of the past, but instead of a punch in the gut, something softer. Something to welcome and hold on to. A reminder of the girl who I was.

Seven, Taylor Swift

Girlhood, I always thought, was a haunted house I learned to live in. But for a time, I lived in Barbie’s Dreamhouse and I patiently wait for Greta Gerwig to bring that back to me.

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